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As we continue in this series on the roles of ego, I’d like to look at a much different side of ego than we did yesterday. Yesterday, I praised ego as a thing that should be desirable for blogging.

However, business is a completely different animal. In business, your partners and customers depend on you to deliver and execute. Blogging is really a one man show, for the most part, and therefore ego works and is necessary. Your future and success in blogging depends on how well you deliver profile and reputation to yourself. In business, personal profile and reputation are tabled as a poison to the success of the organization.

Ego, in fact, is a cancer to the organization and can be referenced as the point of failure in so many businesses, whether they be major enterprise organizations having hundreds of thousands of employees or a small tech company having 5 people.

In big business we have a saying that can probably be heard through the halls of many other types of companies – cover your own ass because no one will do it for you. And the truth is that in most situations, this is 100% true. But that doesn’t make it right.

When you’re in business with someone, it’s more important to cover the asses of the organization and the people you work with because it generates team trust. In business, the guy who is the lone ranger, always doing things to promote himself, always seems to be working against the natural flow of the organization. Politics come into play as egos need to be served, instead of the best interests of the customers. It’s unhealthy.

Worse yet, when the leadership structure works against itself by serving personal pride rather than the common goals of the organization, it introduces doubt and instability in the rest of the organization. Even issues deemed internal end up being seen by customers and potential customers alike. A prime example is the issue with the Google jetliner and the bickering between Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Google CEO Eric Schmidt about what kinds of beds they would have on the jetliner. Incidentally, and I don’t think wholey unrelated, Google has not released a quality product in a long time. That’s a subjective statement, I realize, but name something that has been absolutely phenomenal since Gmail? Could self-pampering trickle down through the company to the point of the entire company sitting comfortably back on their laurels? It’s just a question.

Ego never serves a company well and when personal pride comes before the execution of the business plan, the organization will suffer.

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Written by Aaron Brazell on September 6, 2006

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